Girls and boys and doors open and closed

Mama at the Elmo Wallpaper wrote a lovely, achingly honest post today about the thought of saying goodbye to the dream of the daughter she had hoped to have. Aidan responded with her own musings on the children we imagine and those we actually have, on the collision between our dreams and our reality.

Both have made me thoughtful. I have one girl and one boy. I admit: I always, desperately wanted a daughter. I am one of two girls, I wrote my thesis on the mother-daughter relationship, I think my own mother is pretty damned awesome…. in short, I really wanted to have a girl. And I think I always suspected that I’d have boys, feared that somehow the universe would screw with my blatant desires. I did not find out the gender of my babies in either pregnancy. But when I was pregnant with Grace I had a strong, visceral sense that she was a girl. Everybody had a point of view, from strangers on the street to my closest friends. Everybody claimed I was carrying a boy. I kept my firm conviction to myself, worried that by voicing it I’d be jinxing myself.

And then she arrived, like a hurricane, and she was a girl. And despite digging my fingernails into the rocky edge as hard as I possibly could, I slid far and fast over the precipice into despair. I remember thinking, in the midst of the deep darkness of depression, that it was crazy that I was sad. I had what I had always wanted: daughter. How could I be sad?

When I was pregnant the second time I had absolutely no idea what gender the baby was. I made the joke about hermaphrodites and said “I just don’t want to have to make a call in the delivery room!” about a thousand times. When he was born, though, I was honestly shocked. That instinctive reaction made me realized I had, somehow, subconsciously assumed he was a girl. My Phoebe was not to be. So he was – and is – my little boy.

My experiences of my children, of course, are wildly different. They were different from the outset. I was so afraid of what would happen after Whit was born that I set up a triple-reinforced belt-and-suspenders set of support systems. I had drugs, shrinks, and baby nurses. Hot and cold running help. And through the blessing of that, and whatever else was different the second time around, I truly enjoyed Whit’s infancy. The truth is that Grace’s babyhood and my ambivalent, conflicted reaction to motherhood gouged deep wounds into me. Though those scars strained when Whit was born, they did not rip open. My experience of Whit as a baby was inexpressably healing. I am still working out the nuances of both experiences and how they shifted, subtly but profoundly, my sense of myself.

To this day, Grace and Whit are very different and my feelings about being a mother to each of them are likewise distinct. I cannot, of course, disaggregate gender from birth order and basic personality and all of the inputs into the particular equation that spits out How We Feel About Motherhood. Of course not. But Mama and Aidan’s posts made me think about it.

I feel very lucky to be able to have the particular experience of being mother to a girl and to a boy. I do have some sadness, however, that Grace will never have a sister. This reared its head for me when my sister had her second daughter. My own sister is so important to me that I grieve the fact that Grace won’t have that particular experience. Of course she will have a different one, and I hope it will be equally, though differently, wonderful. We are off to a mixed start, though when things like this come home I feel hopeful. (an aside: Bouff, this is why you have a second one)
What really struck me about my friend’s posts, though, was the notion of final decisions. Of closing doors and of coming to terms with the ways that the life we have may not live up to the life we imagined. I am terrible at finality. I hate closing off options. You could argue that my professional life is where it is because of I am so damned allergic to actually choosing something. It is clear to me now that a set of choices designed to maximize options does not, in fact, maximize joy and fulfillment. I did not realize that for a long time. Of course when you don’t know what DOES maximize joy or fulfillment for yourself, it’s an easy algorithm by which to make decisions.

As I move inexorably forward towards middle age I am realizing that, despite my adamant efforts, there are plenty of doors that are firmly shut. Plenty of roads that are no longer available. There is definitely sadness in this, but is there also some sense of relief? Some of this is active choice, some of it is sheer chance, much of it is in the murky area that lies between those two polarities. As I’ve written before, my life is exactly as I planned it and also nothing like I imagined it would be.

I believe that every day the individual we are confronts the self we wanted – and still want – to be. There is both intense grief and huge potential in the friction between those selves. This holds true for every manifestation of our selves: lives, careers, families, things fundamental and things frivolous. I think that to accept status quo without challenging it or aspiring to more is a sad fate, but I also think that to chafe constantly at the differences that exist between what is and what might have been is a short road to misery. So there has to be something in the middle. There has to be a way of honoring our lives, in all their kaleidoscope color of joy, beauty, pain, disappointment, humor, love, and challenge, while also remembering that which we dreamed of. May we all find it.